Levin to testify on warming

Days after announcing that Yale will host a national conference on climate change in April, University President Richard Levin has confirmed he will testify this week before the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee as Congress prepares to take up debate on a bill that would cap greenhouse gas emissions.

Levin, who has made sustainability one of his presidency’s pillars, has often called for the federal government to address global warming and will repeat that plea in his testimony Thursday before a committee that happens to include four Yalies.

As Levin put it in an interview last week: “All of us would like to see the federal government step up.”

The University has not yet publicly announced Levin’s plans to speak, nor has the committee itself released any details. But in response to an inquiry from the News, Levin confirmed Friday he will indeed testify at the hearing, titled “Examining Strategies to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions at U.S. Colleges and Universities,” according to the Committee’s Web site.

By an 11-8 vote in December, the Committee approved a broad climate-change bill that calls for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent from 2005 levels by 2050. It was the first legislation of its kind to be taken up in Congress.

Sponsored by Sens. Joseph Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67 of Connecticut and John Warner of Virginia, the bill would create a so-called “cap-and-trade” system in which companies would be given pollution allowances; if they were to achieve levels below the limits on greenhouse gas emissions, they could sell their remaining allowance to other companies. Conversely, they could buy allowances from others if they appeared likely to exceed the emissions cap.

But critics of the legislation have warned it could hinder American industry. The bill is expected to come up for debate before the full Senate in June, making next week’s hearing particularly timely.

Levin, who also holds the title of Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Economics, has spoken widely about sustainability both from the view of a university president and from the perspective of an economist. He has argued that if Yale’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are any indicator, it should be economically feasible for large institutions to promote sustainability without suffering financially — a point he is likely to emphasize next week, considering the popular complaint against the Lieberman-Warner bill.

Levin’s testimony will be his second major public address on the issue of climate change this year. In January, in a much-anticipated speech at the University of Copenhagen, Levin called for a carbon tax or emissions quota to be backed by the United States, Europe, India and China and adopted worldwide.

Without either measure, Levin said, the voluntary actions of organizations like Yale will not be enough to head off rising temperatures worldwide.

“The magnitude of the problem highlights one important fact: The solution must be global,” Levin said in his address, the first in a series of public addresses on climate change sponsored by the University of Copenhagen in advance of a United Nations climate summit to be held in Denmark next year.

“If any one of these four economic powers refuses to participate in an international program to reduce carbon, we cannot succeed in stabilizing global temperatures,” he continued. “Any one holdout pursuing a business-as-usual strategy will make the cost of adequate global reduction prohibitive.”

Levin said he will read a portion of the Copenhagen speech to the Senate committee and will then take questions from the lawmakers on the panel. The full text of his speech will be submitted to the committee, he said.

While Denmark may have been unfamiliar territory for Yale’s president, Levin will hardly be lonely in Washington. In fact, he will not even be the only Eli in the hearing room.

Among the members of the committee are Lieberman, Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 of New York, Sheldon Whitehouse ’78 of Rhode Island and Amy Klobuchar ’82 of Minnesota, who met with the Yale Corporation at its February meeting to discuss, among other things, climate change.

That issue, meanwhile, continues to receive significant attention in New Haven. Yale is already several years ahead of schedule in its initiative to bring about a 10-percent cut in its greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by the year 2020.

And in April, the University will host a conference of state governors on the topic climate change, at which California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who two years ago signed into law the first-ever statewide cap on greenhouse gas emissions, will deliver a public address.

At least four other governors — M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut, Jon Corzine of New Jersey, Christine Gregoire of Washington and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas — are expected to attend the summit, to be held April 17 and 18 at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Comments

Beinecke Professor

If Levin wants to stand up for true economic principles, he'll announce his support for a Pigouvian Tax.

Bravo Levin!

One has to credit Levin for his moral and ethical leadership from lightbulbs to hybrids to global warming warnings.
In the '70's we longed for college presidents to speak clearly and directly but most of them engaged in benign neglect and instransigent equivocation on issues like war and racism.
Levin is the fruit of the Revolution. It would be nice to imagine him somehow turning China into a Yale wannabe. Maybe that's hoping for too much---although capitalism does have a way of seducing the masses, and Yale with its double digit portfolio is certainly one of the ripest fruits on the capitalist tree.